How long does it take to read The House of Wisdom?
How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance
Jim Al-Khalili
The House of Wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili takes about 6 hours 10 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 10 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2012. 336 pages, about 92,400 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 16 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 10 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 51 minutes |
The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A myth-shattering view of the Islamic world's myriad scientific innovations and the role they played in sparking the European Renaissance. Many of the innovations that we think of as hallmarks of Western science had their roots in the Arab world of the middle ages, a period when much of Western Christendom lay in intellectual darkness. Jim al- Khalili, a leading British-Iraqi physicist, resurrects this lost chapter of history, and given current East-West tensions, his book could not be timelier. With transporting detail, al-Khalili places readers in the hothouses of the Arabic Enlightenment, shows how they led to Europe's cultural awakening, and poses the question: Why did the Islamic world enter its own dark age after such a dazzling flowering?
Subjects: Methodology, Renaissance Science, Intellectual life, Science, Philosophy, Medieval Science
